The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly. Wallace Stevens
All the time we are being shown the true nature of things. Yet they are veiled from us and that veil is our own mind. We are given the truth, but from it we make an illusion, a dreamlike world.
The Yogacara teachings are showing us how to lift this veil, how to finally wake up from the dream, or at least to wake up within the dream.
The teachings are practical and yet fantastical and mysterious. We are asked to suspend our disbelief, to leave behind our common sense notions of things and to try on the radical view of the Yogacara.
So what is that view? That all we have is our experience; all we can know is our own knowing; and that anything beyond this is pure speculation. Rather than alienating us from the so-called 'world out there' this view brings us into an immediate intimacy with our self and everything in our world. Suddenly what seemed to be 'out there' is very close. In fact it's as if it were a part of us, and yet at the same time mysterious and ungraspable.
For the Yogacarins this wasn't about philosophising. They had nothing to prove, nor were they interested in theories. They did not take the position that there was nothing out there, but like Kant they asked, "how could we know?"
What we experience is determined by the nature of the apparatus through which we experience. It would be an incredible coincidence if what happens to be apprehensible by us happens also to coincide with the totality of what there is. Brian Magee on Kant
The poetic act, the act of the mind, illuminates the surface of things. This act is part of the thing and not about it. Wallace Stevens (inspired by Kant)
Of course these teachings go right back to the Buddha's time, we find in the Dhammapada -
Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind,
happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.
Their starting point was this - we have our own experience and that is all we have. If we are to find reality, this is were we have to find it. If we are going to wake up, we have to wake up within our own experience.
Where there is no imagination, there no thing can be. As we take on this view, that our world is an 'imagining', a dream, we find that this softens our
attachment, yet we still feel deeply for this imaginary world.
This is a kind of koan. It reminds me of one of my favourite stories which from memory goes like this:
One day Milarepa's teacher Marpa is with his disciples, his son has just died and he is overcome with grief. His disciples don't know what to think. For years Marpa has
been teaching them that life is an illusion and here they are faced with his grief at losing his son. Eventually one of them asks:
"Marpa haven't you taught us that everything is an illusion? Why then do you grieve in this way for your son?" He replies: "It is true, everything thing is illusory
and the death of a son is the most painful illusion of all."
If you know a bit about the Yogacara, you may be familiar with their model of the 8 consciousnesses. You may remember Bhante's lectures and in your mind's eye you might be visualising what became known as 'the rubber glove model', (it looked like an inflated rubber glove!) When we see consciousness mapped out like this it can seem be a bit unappealing, but what we have to remember is that the Yogacarins didn't come up with this model as some academic exercise. It came about as the result of them trying to answer their own questions; it came out of intense practice which always gives rise to burning questions.
What were their questions?
To these we can add our own questions...
They answered these questions in two ways: with a view and a path. The view was that there is only experience and anything outside of that we must hold lightly while the path was concrete; a path of action.
When insight does arise it won't come as a particular experience of say 'seeing things as they really are'. We won't have an experience 'of' reality. It won't be our ordinary experience encountering something extraordinary. No, from the Yogacara point of view what happens is a complete transformation in the way we experience. 'What' we experience will presumably be no different from what we are experiencing right now. But the way we experience it will be completely transformed. This transformation Bhante calls, "a turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness".
And though it sounds rather mystical, it comes about through a path of regular steps. All of the practices that we engage in: dharma study, meditation, friendship, ethics and so on, all directly contribute to this transformation and to the arising of insight.
Just how this works it what the Yogacara sets out to explain.
In the Anguttara Nikaya there is this verse -
My action is my possession,
My action is my inheritance,
My action is the womb, which bears me,
My action is my refuge.
Anguttara Nikaya
My action is my possession - what we possess is our own free will. We can't always choose what we are given but we can choose what we do with what we are given. In other words we can choose how we act in this world,
My action is my inheritance - in other words, we reap what we sow. Ratnaguna said in a talk recently that our world operates under the law of karma and we could see this as meaning that we live in a Pure Land.
My action is the womb, which bears me - how we act today determines what we become tomorrow. We are literally born each moment out of our previous choices.
My action is my refuge - this is our refuge. We don't wait for some mystical moment. We act now in ways that will gradually transform the very nature of our consciousness until eventually there is this deep turning about and all is unveiled.
I guess I chose to lead these retreats because I find the Yogacara teachings both fascinating and very practical, and I wanted to take my exploration of them further and do that with others. Here are just 3 things that are great about the Yogacara. To hear more do come on one of the retreats or weekends!
It explains how practice works. I've not really understood until recently how this dharma practice of ours is supposed to work. How does my not nicking paperclips from work connect with insight? Well the Yogacara shows us exactly how.
I once heard Sagaramati saying that years ago, in the time of the Buddha and the perioid that followed, the problem was trsna, thirst or craving, and therefore the practice was all about renunciation. These days the craving/renunciation approach is rather unfashionable and for us the problem we are interested in is ignorance which means we want to acquire knowledge. Now what is great about the Yogacara is that it combines these two. In fact it shows that you cannot approach them separately.
Lastly, for now, the Yogacara view is one that you can try on like a pair of glasses What does it feel like to view things this way? For me it seems to bring mystery into the everyday; it blurs the divisions between myself and others and gives a sense of being intimately mindful of my world.
If it should be true that reality exists
In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,
The long bladed knife, the little to drink and her
Misericordia, it follows that
Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven
Before and after one arrives or, say,
Bergamo in a postcard, Rome after dark,
Sweden described... Wallace Stevens
For a full ramble around the Yogacara listen to Subhuti's talks 'Rambles Around the Yogacara' on freebuddhistaudio which have been my main inspiration.
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